Willy went quiet.
Eric lifted her chin. "The profession's rigged anyway. How do you earn computer points? By winning tournaments that award computer points. How do you get into tournaments that award computer points? By having computer points. That's not the only catch-22. How do you make a living playing tennis? By getting into the top 200. How do you get into the top 200? By devoting one hundred percent of your time to tennis, and thereby
not
making a living. You can't get there from here with a day job, Wilhelm. This is still an upper-class sport. I'm sorry your own father hasn't been supportive, and I'm glad, financially anyway, that you've got Max. But you won't make me feel lousy about my dad. Patronage is how it's done."
She dropped it, eaten by a new curiosity. "Underwood? Why
do
you want to play tennis professionally? After an Ivy League degree in math?"
"You wouldn't go out with a computer hacker, would you? Reason enough."
"I'm serious."
Eric drummed his fingers. "It's challenging. Keeps me in shape. I could stand to make a packet of money. And I'll have to retire by forty at the latest, so it allows for a second career."
"You
like
that? Being forced to quit?"
"Sure. I need variety. I get bored easily. Who'd want to play tennis all day until they're ninety-two?"
"I would!"
"Well, you're a nut," he said affectionately.
"God, I dread retirement. When I think about how few years I have left, I feel like I'm on death row."
"Why do
you
want to play pro, Wilhelm?"
"What kind of a stupid question is that?" she snapped.
Eric laughed. "The same stupid question you asked me."
"In my case that's like asking why do I insist on breathing."
Eric examined her with real incredulity. "You've really never asked yourself that, have you?"
"Not once," Willy acceded. "I don't have reasons, though I was pretty sure that you would. I'm a tennis player. I can't envision being anything else and still being me. If I thought up explanations, they'd come afterwards. They'd just be something to say."
"OK, but
unreasoning
isn't generally a compliment."
Willy had the queer impression that he was jealous. "You grew up with a whole series of ambitions," she said softly, taking his hand. "Politics, basketball, mathematics. Me, maybe you'd call me limited, or obsessive. I've always had one true love."
His eyes narrowed another millimeter, and he slipped his fingers out from beneath her palm. "Are you accusing me of being a dilettante?"
"I'm not accusing you of anything!" Willy cried in exasperation. "I'm sure you're more adaptable than I am. You're brilliant at all kinds of stuff, and that's hardly a criticism. But I'm not the only one who's irrational or less than candid with themselves. Because you've never answered
my
question. What if it turns out you don't have the goods in tennis? What if your two years go by and you're stranded in the 800's? Or unranked altogether? That happens, and to decent players. How would you take it?"
"Told you," he said. "Do something else." Eric didn't usually speak with his mouth full; the garbling of his answer seemed deliberate, as if he didn't want to hear it himself.
"Like what?"
"Dunno," he said tersely. "What about you?"
"What about me what?"
"If you don't make it."
Willy was tempted to defend that $30,000 didn't sound like much but it was plenty for her rank and she was starting to make a living and so she had already, to some degree, "made it," unlike
some
people who still got a monthly check from their
daddies.
"I can't imagine, I—try not to think about it."
"Exactly." Eric dabbed his mouth with a teachery expression, as if he'd been putting her to a test again and she'd barely passed. "I don't believe in contingency plans. A little imagination is a dangerous thing. Picture the future where you're foundering and before you know it this bleak landscape is framed on your living room wall. Put up travel posters. You'll do great. I'll do great. We'll do great."
He spanked rice grains off his hands. Though only a year his senior, for once Willy felt appreciably older than her boyfriend.
The National Tennis Center had a wretched reputation among players—the crowds were rambunctious and disrespectful; the stadium was plunked smack-dab under LaGuardia Airport's flight path. Willy had long turned a deaf ear to such carping. She herself had been forced to focus through a foofooraw of wailing car alarms, plinking ice cream trucks, or thumping outdoor rock concerts in nearly every scrappy tournament she'd entered. As far as Willy was concerned, the National Tennis Center was as reverent and hushed as St. Peter's. If Steffi Graf groused that she couldn't concentrate there, Willy Novinsky would happily take her place.
Willy loved Flushing Meadow. She'd been a ballgirl there in the McEnroe era, and had a crush on the volatile bad boy of tennis when she was fifteen. Since then, she always ducked behind security tape to say hello to the man who still managed the ball-retrieval team, and brought him up to date on her career. Though she'd never been a contender here, familiarity with the tunnels and locker rooms, of which the public were ignorant, infused her with a proprietary sense of access. At the NTC she dared to believe, as Eric did daily with such unnatural ease, that center court was her destiny.
With amazement, Willy was led by the hand on September 7, not up switchbacking ramps to the upper tiers of rowdy proles, but to the hallowed courtside seats reserved for corporations and blueblood families. Screwed on the backs of their chairs gleamed two plastic plaques: OBERDORE. In that it had become customary to hand on permanent U.S. Open seats in one's will, some day these thrones could belong to Eric. Willy conceded that privilege did not seem altogether obnoxious from the standpoint of its beneficiary.
Yet Willy and Eric seemed destined to remain on opposite sides of the net. As he supported the incumbent Reagan in '84, Eric promptly backed Stefan Edberg, the obvious favorite, who had won the U.S. Open the previous year. Eric
knew
she was rooting for the challenger, Larry Punt—a modestly ranked hopeful who had battled his way through the qualies into the round-of-sixteen.
"Are you being deliberately contrary?" she asked. "Every time we watch a match, you back the other guy."
"That's because you have such a soft spot for long shots, Wilhelm. Whenever some poor slob is ranked 4,002, or is coming back from an injury that will eventually put him out of the game forever, you take his side. Who's being contrary?"
"Since your ranking isn't far from 4,002 you might sympathize with the player who isn't famous."
"For most of these people, this is entertainment," he murmured, leaning forward. "For you and me, this is a vicarious exercise. So it's a question of with whom you identify. That piece of kelp out there, even if he freakishly took this match, would only get cut to ribbons in the quarters. Why go down with the no-name in your head? Make it easy on yourself, and identify with the front-runner. If you throw your mental lot in with the lowly, there's no logical limit. You may as well imagine yourself as an aspirant ballgirl."
"I was a ballgirl," she said icily, tugging the empty arms of her sweater around her shoulders and jerking them in a knot. "Edberg is drab. Typical Swede. He has no personality, and his face is about as expressive as set cement."
"Who needs personality with a volley like that?"
"Tennis should be a test of character."
"Character, maybe. Not personality."
"What's the difference?"
Eric assumed a patient tone. "Personality involves frilly quirks like I-have-to-wear-my-lucky-headband. Character entails flushing all that emotional froufrou down the toilet and getting on with the job."
She turned to Eric's face with amazement, which had assumed the same rigid intensity that he wore on court. Eric was a great admirer of technique, the exterior game, and if the interior existed for him at all, it was to be obliterated. Presumably in Eric's view the most exemplary tennis players didn't, themselves, exist. But Willy was riveted by the storms of frustration, beleaguerment, and redoubled determination washing over a player's face like island weather. To Willy, the interior game
was
the game—your feelings could be played like a violin, or they could play you. Eric's solution was not to master the emotions but to make them go away. If he himself could pull off such a vanishing act, he was either a shaman, or a machine.
When she turned back to the game, Punt had been given a warning for racket abuse. The underdog was screaming at the umpire, who gazed unconcernedly at an airplane overhead.
"No class," Eric hissed.
"It was a bad call!"
"Which wouldn't be overturned if Edberg's shot had landed so far wide that it bounced on our picnic basket…. Christ, what a trashy outburst."
"Punt is 5–1 down! He's frazzled."
"So if he can't play tennis, he could at least behave himself. Losing all the more behooves him to be gracious."
"Gracious defeat is always insincere, and if I were being humiliated at what I cared about most in the world in front of thousands of people, I'd blow off a little steam at the umpire myself."
Meanwhile, Larry Punt was giving his all. He was drenched in sweat, and lunged for every return, if reliably to no avail. For Edberg was in a zone, and deep lobs drove him to his backcourt for only the one winning overhead. Willy tried to get Eric to appreciate that at least Punt didn't roll over.
Eric shrugged. "Makes for better spectating, but doesn't affect the result."
"God, you sound so contemptuous…when he's playing his guts out—"
"Quiet!" shushed a woman behind them.
"Keep it down," Eric muttered.
"Oh, who cares what the buttinsky thinks?"
"I care," he scolded.
"Of course you do; anything to do with what other people think and how somebody appears. All this stiff-upper-lipping
tut-tut
when you're not even British—" Willy burst into tears.
"Willy! What's with you?" Apologizing to their neighbors, Eric ushered her from the stands.
"Honey." He wrapped his arms around her under what might have been the Open's single spindly tree. "What's wrong? I thought we were having a nice time."
Now that Willy had the most to say she couldn't talk. "All you care about is—" Her throat caught. "All you care about is—" she would have to choose single words carefully "
—winning
."
She expected the usual
There-there-I-care-about
-you
sweetheart!
but instead he laughed and smoothed her hair and said, "Oh, Willy. Not nearly as much as you do."
Her sniffles subsided and they resumed their seats, where Willy discovered that she didn't revile Edberg quite so virulently any longer. Yet on the subway back to Manhattan, Willy was reserved, choosing to stand and read the MTA's Poem of the Week even when two adjacent seats became available.
"Little Miss Macho," Eric muttered in her ear, swinging from the next strap to dig a forefinger discreetly into her ribs. "Can't be caught sitting down."
He meant lighten up; she couldn't. Some bitter pill from their outing was still undissolved. "Happy?" Over the clatter of wheels, she had to shout. "The impertinent nothing was crushed. More laurels for the automaton."
"I'm delirious with joy," he said, flouncing into one of the seats. Eric wouldn't be lured into another public confrontation, and grabbed a discarded
New York Times.
Willy grew alarmed that in reviving the antagonism she'd gone too far, and now Eric wouldn't come home with her. At that prospect, her face drained and broke out in a sticky sweat. The train jostled her clenched jaw, and her teeth clacked. When Eric didn't tromp out of the car at Grand Central for his connection with the number six, she went so weak-kneed with relief that she dropped into the seat next to him, with only one stop to go. Something awful was happening. It shouldn't have mattered so much, whether he stayed over. Willy had slept complacently alone most of her life.
"OK, I give up!" he declared, slamming the door of her apartment. "Truth is, you don't give a rat's ass about Larry Punt. So what's this really about?"
Eric switched on the overhead, and in its blaze Willy felt pasty and exposed.
"I'm a little distressed that we admire such different players," she said haltingly.
"You like Boris Becker?" he fired at her, bombing into the couch.
"Yes, I—"
"Bingo. We have something in
common
. Feel better?"
"There's one other player who we may not see eye to eye on." Willy stood staring down at her hands.
"I can't see what better to unite any couple than mutual revulsion for Andre Agassi, so who do you have in mind?"
"Me," said Willy quietly.
"Hey, come here." Eric reached and pulled her to his side, and then thought better of the overhead light. He lit a candle and killed the third-degree glare.
"You like these stony, stoic types," she went on in the crook of his shoulder. "But I stamp my feet, leap up and down—"
"And talk to yourself all the time," he finished for her with a smile. "
Take your racket back! Kill the son of a bitch! Follow through on that
volley!"
"You're making fun of me."
"Of course." He kissed her forehead. "You charm the pants off me on the tennis court, you know that."
"But you're so contained. I've never seen you display a single emotion in a match."
"That's illegal?"